Choosing in Groups: Analytical Politics Revisited

I was looking for an introduction to public choice theory because I was assigned to speak on it for my history of economic thought class. Someone on twitter pointed me to the original version of this book, and through the magic of twitter, Munger himself saw the tag and then pointed me to the second edition.Though it was interesting to read – it is more of a text book and wasn’t exactly what I was looking for as an introduction. The Adam Smith Institute has a better high-level overview that I used that had fewer charts and graphs and math (sorry Munger).

This pioneering work is a rigorous yet readable introduction to analytical political science – and by far the best of its type on the market. There’s pretense and posturing in the way some political science has evolved in recent decades, with ideology trumping objectivity, but that’s no part of this book, for it incorporates real science into political science."Choosing in Groups" has three main parts. Part I presents the basics of how decision-making occurs in groups, including how groups decide on the rules of the game (first deciding how to decide, at a constitutional level). Politics, according to the authors, is “constituted cooperative action” and “the practical process of group choice,” while “analytical politics is the study of choosing in groups.” Part I introduces the principles of valid deduction and inference, presents the essential elements of explanatory-mathematical models, addresses preference aggregation, examines moves from anarchy (state of nature) to systems of formal governance (civil society), discusses how majorities can rule without violating minority rights, and explains how utilities can be maximized consistent with the Pareto standard. Notable also in Part I are discussions of how democratic choice can yield outcomes at odds with the majority’s real preferences.Part II is more technical, yet indispensable to the authors’ broad aim of conveying the real science of political science. The core of it entails explications, applications and extensions of spatial theory – first developed in the late 1950s by Anthony Downs and Duncan Black – which assigns electoral preferences along a continuum and shows how winning candidates and policies lay closest to the “ideal points” of electoral majorities. The section includes clear presentations and fresh insights on the Median Voter Theorem, issue salience, the prevalence of non-separable dimensions, the single-peakedness (or lack thereof) of preferences, and the stability (equilibrating) properties of majority rule.Part III widens the analytical scope by examining “the social choice problem” more broadly-construed, first by treating Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem and discussing its implications for the legitimacy (or not) of majority rule – next by an analysis of voting and the information voters either have, don’t have, or don’t even bother to gather – and lastly, a robust examination of the dynamics of political competition, especially when voters’ preferences are uncertain.Although "Choosing in Groups" offers value to the intelligent citizen wishing to bypass silly headlines and decode or predict deeper political trends, university professors especially will be wise (and thus appear wise, before their students) to adopt the book in introductory courses, given its comprehensive theoretical-analytical foundation. Regardless of where the serious student wishes to go next, academically – be it political theory, comparative politics, international relations, political methodology, political economy, or even the law – Choosing in Groups provides a solid grounding in the time-tested mathematical and social-scientific methods which permit political science to be both credible and powerful.

Half interesting, thoroughly good on the subject... or to put it another way, "It's good, if you like that sort of thing."

Great Book! Great Professor!

This is a readable introduction to the fundamental limitations of voting systems, including Arrow's impossibility theorem and McKelvey's chaos theorem. It also describes the more optimistic Median Voter Theorem. It introduces and describes these theorems, but does not prove them rigorously, so you will either have to trust to your understanding of Munger's explanation, or hunt them down for yourself to see the details (I have never seen a proof of Arrow's theorem that I found readable, which may explain why Munger has not attempted to include one).Munger says that in practice democracies muddle through because their institutions moderate some of the problems laid out by the theories, but the theory he presents doesn't provide much positive guidance for this, although I would deduce from what he says that representative democracy such as we have is likely to be better than direct democracy, even (especially?) if that was accelerated by computer voting. He doesn't discuss the pros and cons of particular different voting systems, and a short comment appears to favour plurality, which I presume is equivalent to our first past the post, as an encouragement to the formation of a small number of moderate parties. I claim that recent British electoral history shows that this decisiveness has the disadvantage of magnifying regional differences by handing out large contiguous blocks of seats to regional parties: I think the system used to elect MSPs has functioned better than the system used to elect Scottish MPs.